Heard Island and McDonald Islands Marine Reserve proposed proclamation and proposal to prepare a draft management plan

The proposed expansion of the marine reserve and the current zoning design released on 5th July 2024 is inadequate to protect the diverse range of habitats present. There are several major deficiencies in the science underpinning the government proposal and highlight the need to address these through extensions to the proposed marine reserve.

In order to properly represent the different habitats the design of the reserve needs to include in fully protected areas (IUCN Category I/II) the different benthic environments that are home to different suites of benthic species. The most recent reviews on benthic habitats are by Welsford et al (2024), and our review (Constable et al, 2024), which is attached. The proposed extension does not account for the recommendations in both of these reports.

The proposed expansion of the marine reserve allocates the lowest level of protection directly to those areas that Australian research has shown to be the most important foraging areas for seals and seabirds that breed on Heard Island, which coincides with the areas used by the fishing industry.

The Australian Antarctic Division has made a fundamental error in using much older data to “map” bottom features that was not designed for fine-scale reserve design, and ignoring more up-to-date and accurate data from Geoscience Australia.

The identification of the large national park zones in deep offshore waters has been identified using a large-scale predator tracking data set from around the Southern Ocean, which does not provide guidance for identifying conservation values at a spatial scale relevant to the Heard Island, and ignores finer scale data from Australia that highlights key foraging areas for seals and seabirds that breed on Heard Island that are critical during the period when the parents need the shortest possible distance between catching prey and feeding their land-based offspring.